Gray Is My Favorite Color

“Gray is my favorite color,” is one of my most random favorite song lyrics of all time. Why, you ask? Here are at least five reasons, though none are most important:

It’s true. I genuinely love the color. Nearly every room of my home is painted a different version of gray, and a good percentage of my clothes are gray.

I love the color so much even my hair is slowly turning gray.

It’s from the Counting Crows song, “Mr. Jones.” I still really dig that tune.

As a marketer, I’ve always loved the Grey Poupon campaign, even though I don’t really like Grey Poupon (plus – it’s really more on the brown side).

A very popular book and movie have “Grey” in the mix.

But, the most important reason gray is my favorite color is because it owns the creative space between black and white. It’s no surprise gray often represents the area where only difficult choices exist because there are no absolute right or wrong decisions. I find it rather ironic that gray is so ubiquitous, there’s not even one right way to spell the word gray. It’s grammatically correct as either “gray” or “grey.”

Since this post is listed under the category of Business Insights, it seems to me gray is as good a color as any to represent how it feels to run a business or manage other people. The future’s always uncertain, and every key decision can be second guessed to death. But if you can learn to live with a healthy amount of ambiguity and stand behind difficult decisions when they work, and especially when they don’t, you might just find the grayness exhilarating and the successes all the more rewarding. Plus, without a world of gray, you’d never know when something, or someone, truly adds color to your life.

Steven Handmaker is Chief Marketing Officer at Assurance. He serves as a member of Assurance’s executive management team and is responsible for the company’s marketing, communications, branding and digital media efforts. As Assurance’s top creative professional, he provides counsel on all strategic initiatives and acts as the primary writer and editor of key company messages. Steven graduated from Illinois State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Public Relations and Political Science.